5 SEO Mistakes Your Dealership Should Avoid

If your dealership has an SEO strategy or is in the process of developing one, there are a number of pitfalls to be aware of.

Being a good search engine marketer is not just about knowing what SEO tactics you should be using, but also being aware of the things you must avoid. Listed here are some of the most common SEO mistakes made which can harm the effectiveness of your campaign.

1.    Duplicate or Low-Quality Content

Content is such a vital part of an SEO strategy, but if you don’t get it right, it can be almost as bad as not having it at all.

If you are duplicating content internally across your site or externally from other sites, search engines are likely to disregard it and you’ll risk losing out on the authority you would have gained from the content in the first place.

Not only do you need to make sure that your website content is unique, but it must also be high quality. This means that it should be relevant, grammatically correct and optimised with keywords.

2.    Keyword Overload

While we heavily stress the importance of having a keyword strategy, there is such a thing as using too many keywords. Search engines have updated and refined their algorithms over time and have now cracked down on a tactic known as keyword stuffing.

This is exactly what it sounds like, injecting keywords throughout your site with the sole purpose of ranking higher in search engine results. This hinders readability and worsens user experience, which will not sit well with search engines. Most experts agree that there is no perfect keyword density, but that terms should be evenly distributed in a natural manner.

3.    Lack of Updates

There is a method of incorporating plenty of keywords in a natural way on your site which also offers a number of other SEO benefits. I am talking, of course, about blogs. Click Dealer has just released its new blog feature for websites, specifically designed to help car dealers improve their SEO.

When determining the ranking of web pages, search engines tend to give precedence to those which have been recently updated because they are likely to contain more relevant and accurate content. Blogs allow you to offer a regular stream of new, unique, keyword-rich content.

4.    Dodgy Backlinks

A big mistake that marketers make when attempting to optimise a website is neglecting to do a backlink clean-up first. Search engines weren’t previously as strict as they are today, in fact, in the past you would be able to acquire links from external sites to your own without having to worry whether or not the source itself was reputable and relevant.

This is no longer the case, and any bad links you have gained, whether you know about them or not, will tarnish your reputation and prevent your site from building authority. You must find and either eradicate or disavow any ‘dodgy’ backlinks and refrain from engaging in bad link-building practices which will lead to low-quality referrals in the future.

5.    Not Keeping Track

There is no point in dedicating a tonne of resources to create an excellent SEO strategy if you can’t see whether or not it is working. You need to clearly identify your KPIs, which may include

• Increasing the volume of organic traffic to your site
• Increasing the volume of traffic from specific geographic locations
• Increasing search engine ranking for certain terms

Your journey to achieving these goals can be tracked through platforms like Google Analytics and we recommend conducting a monthly analysis to ensure you are heading in the right direction, and so you are able to spot areas for improvement.

For more advice about automotive SEO, get in touch with Click Dealer and speak to one of our experts. Email marketing@clickdealer.co.uk, call 01782 478220 or send us a message via our contact page!